In order to maintain their proficiency with firearms, military personnel, law enforcement officers and hunters frequently engage in target practice. Target practice is often performed at a shooting range with hundreds cartridges being fired at each practice session. In the sport of hunting, marksmanship is practiced so that a shot can be carefully placed to ensure a quick, clean and humane kill. For military personnel, good marksmanship may make the difference between victory and defeat in battlefield situations.
Many firearms, including pistols and rifles, are designed to utilize a removable magazine that holds ammunition cartridges. The use of a magazine allows a plurality of stacked cartridges to be easily loaded into the firearm by inserting a single magazine into the firearm. After each cartridge is fired, a manually or automatically operated mechanism moves the bolt of the firearm backward and then forward again. The upper-most cartridge is pulled off the stack of cartridges in the magazine each time the mechanism cycles so that cartridges are fed one-by-one into the firing chamber of the firearm. Each magazine typically has an elongate housing defining a chamber with a spring loaded follower slidably disposed therein. The force of the spring loaded follower urges each cartridge in the magazine toward the upper-most position in the where the bolt can push it into the firing chamber. When all of the cartridges have been fired, the empty magazine is removed from the firearm and a new magazine is inserted in its place. The empty magazine may then be refilled with cartridges. Loading such cartridges manually has been tedious and time consuming. Although devices have been provided to assist in such manual loading, improvements and automating the loading functions in an economical device would be well received.